Chrissy Houlahan on Immigration
Chrissy Houlahan on Immigration
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Fix immigration and give DREAMers a path to citizenship
Chrissy Houlahan supports the Dream and Promise Act of 2019.
This bill protects from deportation and provides legal permanent residence for people under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.
"Dreamers were brought here and know no other home. Many contribute as teachers, medical professionals, business owners, and taxpayers. This bill will allow them to stay with permanent legal status. It is time for us to act and strengthen our country by fixing our broken immigration system.
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Increase both high-skill and family-based visa caps.
Houlahan co-sponsored the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act
Legislative SummaryThis bill increases the per-country cap on family-based immigrant visas from 7% of the total number of such visas available that year to 15%, and eliminates the 7% cap for employment-based immigrant visas.
It also removes an offset that reduced the number of visas for individuals from China. The bill also establishes transition rules for employment-based visas from FY2020-FY2022, by reserving a percentage of EB-2 (workers with advanced degrees or exceptional ability), EB-3 (skilled and other workers), and EB-5 (investors) visas for individuals not from the two countries with the largest number of recipients of such visas. Of the unreserved visas, not more than 85% shall be allotted to immigrants from any single country.
Explanation from the Countable.US: Under the current immigration system, immigrants from any one country can claim no more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards issued annually to foreign nationals working in the U.S. This significantly disadvantages immigrants from larger countries that more immigrants come from.
For example, China (population 1.3 billion) and India have large backlogs of workers wishing to immigrate to and work in the U.S., but they have the name visa caps as countries such as Iceland or Estonia (population 1.3 million), which have both much smaller populations and far fewer citizens seeking to immigrate to the U.S.
The net effect of this is that immigrants from India and China can face decades-long waits, averaging 2-3 times the wait times for immigrants from other countries, for green cards, and many have to return home because they can't get permanent residency; meanwhile, countries such as Iceland and Estonia never come close to reaching their visa limit caps.
Legislative outcome Roll call 437 in House on 7/10/2019 passed 365-65-2; referred to Committee in Senate 7/9/2019; no action as of 1/1/2020.
Source: S.386/H.R.1044 19-HR1044 on Feb 7, 2019
